


Burning Out My Eyes

by ParadifeLoft



Category: Star Wars: Sith Era - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Femslash February, Lots of dialogue, mindgames
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-02
Updated: 2013-02-02
Packaged: 2017-11-27 23:21:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/667623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ParadifeLoft/pseuds/ParadifeLoft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a mission from the Council in the middle of Sith space is the last place where Suria Zaelov, Jedi Knight, wanted or expected to find a childhood friend who had disappeared at the end of the Mandalorian Neo-Crusades with the remnants of the Revanchist movement.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burning Out My Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> Originally intended as a gift for [, as it remains; my lack of timeliness in writing, however, serendipitously allowed its completion to occur just in time for Femslash February. So I guess everyone wins? Both characters are my OFCs, though Suria is loosely based on my KoToR II PC before the two characters diverged into different people in my head.](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Zaatar/pseuds/Zaatar)

The mission had not, so far, been much of a success.

It had not been much a success and, even though mentally, physically, she felt mostly calm, Suria did still find herself troubled. She'd only fairly recently started being sent out on her own assignments, and even if an undercover murder investigation was not by itself particularly deserving of consternation on her part - well. The likelihood of this supposed resurrection of the Sith's involvement, or so the Council said, was probably enough to make anyone jumpy. And so soon after the defeat of the Mandalorians, too. The galaxy wasn't ready for another war. That Suria knew. (If it had even been ready for the first one to begin with.)

The lobby of the hotel she was staying at was almost entirely empty. She was thankful for it, too, even having only to walk a short way through on the way to her room... Some slight residual paranoia. It wasn't quite rational, but then, she'd rather not have to deal with suddenly finding the place had decided to host an annual Dark Side Dabblers' Convention or whatever else Sith did for amusement while she was there.

There were slow footsteps, Suria could hear though, behind her, near the reception desk, and as she neared the elevators they seemed almost to follow her. It was nothing, she was sure; people generally did need to use elevators to get to higher floors of a tall hotel building. Absolutely nothing...

"Well, well. Look who seems to have found her way out to Sith space."

Suria’s gut seemed to freeze cold in her. Breathing, controlled, easy, she reminded herself, instinctively clamping down on the sudden fear. Probably just a mistaken identity or something, no big deal; her disguise was not one to be seen through easily, considering she didn’t even recognise herself in the mirror.

Sliding her face into a slightly dim and bemused look, she turned around – and it was all quite pointless, really, because she still stopped, dead in her tracks, staring.

"Welcome," the speaker drawled, lips curled into a smirk, "to the lord Darth Revan’s _humble_ Empire."

Taisave. No wonder the disguise had been transparent as a plastic film.

"Everyone thought you'd been killed or lost with the other Revanchists," murmured Suria, almost thoughtless and careless in a sort of shock. (As if she needed such familiar words to reveal her identity.) Still, her head bowed, as if from shame or a sudden knowledge that she didn't want. The Revanchists had all been corrupted. And a greeting like that could never have come from the mouth of someone who still counted herself as a fellow Knight.

Even watching the ground, Suria could still see the Miraluka woman from the corner of her eye. And even that, she would rather have gone without - she'd regretted the gulf that had separated them in the last days of the Neo-Crusades, had wished they'd spoken more or even come to some understanding before her friend's disappearance, but to have her re-appear here, now, was not the way she would have wanted to see her again.

Taisave tilted her head and hummed, as if in amused contemplation. Light played off the folds in the silky fabric of the deep hood of her cloak, and shone against her long ink-black hair. "No, I don't think that's quite correct," she said. She took several steps closer, and Suria tensed, from worry at what her once-friend might have been planning, and from the strange, heavy Force presence she exuded.

"You don't quite glow the way you used to," Taisave continued, tone almost sorrowful. "It's what they want, you know, to find the ones with power and pull it in. Contain it. It was why the masters all looked like these sort of... predictable currents, that barely moved, nothing exciting or variable, no intensity."

Her stomach twisted, a little. "Is that what they've been telling you? Is that how you've twisted your memories of the academy around?" Suria asked. Her face was blank, her tone neutral. She hoped. "You feel like the Dark Side."

She waved a hand, dismissive, a gesture that was not unfamiliar but took on quite a different cast here deep in enemy lines, facing down one who had died a friend and returned - what? Not the girl she'd practised lightsaber forms, and meditated, and taken meals, and gotten months of cleaning duty for several instances of sneaking into the protected sections of the Library, with.

But she was. There was a difference, certainly, but to claim this Taisave was somebody entirely unrelated to her old friend Taisave felt only like rote application of a generic lesson to a specific case, like drills with algebra formulas. Knowledge of people, knowledge of the _Force_ , should not feel that way. That was something she _did_ know, deep in her bones.

"What you feel is _power_ , Suria," she said, the eternal excuse. "But come. We shouldn't stand about discussing such things in a lobby. Surely you wouldn't object to catching up over tea and cookies?"

And then Taisave's arm was around her shoulder, steering them in the direction of the elevators - she would have a room here, Suria thought, that was why the chance meeting, rather than her or her mission being discovered and the other woman sent to stalk her.

There was no true way to escape like this, not without causing a scene and, and thus alerting the Sith ( _the other Sith, the real Sith_ , she thought) of her presence and so needing to return home, her assignment a failure. And what exactly could come of it, anyway? This was still the same Taisave she'd known for years; she'd knew her strengths and weaknesses, knew her mannerisms, and more importantly, knew ( _hoped_ ) that no altercation would render that knowledge necessary. Perhaps, through friendly conversation, she could steer her friend away from her mission, or ( _she hardly dared hope_ ) from allegiance to the Sith themselves. Plant a seed of doubt? She could do that, couldn't she? Who better might there be to do so?

So she allowed herself to be led, back stiff-straight and breathing threatening to escape the regular pattern it was forced into, up several stories and down the narrow hallway into what she only assumed was Taisave's rented room.

Even though all the other woman's possessions were neatly folded, neatly placed, neatly packed into their usual orderly containers, she had the almost immediate impression that she'd been here for a decent time. Several days, most likely. The way Taisave walked so familiarly to the kitchenette to pull out the supplies for tea. Beside that, the Force presence that echoed like her friend that lingered over the room.

"Your favourite teas haven't changed, I hope?"

Taisave stood before her, holding out a steaming mug of vanilla black tea with milk, lips curved upward into a slight smile.

"No, they haven't," Suria murmured, and took the mug. It was just the way she liked it.

They sat on the couch, which was plusher than the one in Suria's room and indeed than she would have expected to find in this one either, for that matter.

Taisave took a cookie from the platter on the table before them, and put it to her lips, but did not take a bite. She looked contemplative again. After a moment, her hand dropped back to her lap, cookie still untouched. "You're on Council business," she began, no preamble, just direct but in a way that put one at ease rather than seeming hurried or blunt or forced. Quiet and soft and easy to sink into, like warm just-washed cotton robes stolen from the laundry baskets. Her body didn't face Suria, but she angled slightly toward her from the side, head tilted up and letting her hood flow along the lines of her nose and cheekbones. Studying Suria in the Force.

Suria said nothing.

"I was in the Order just as you were and to attempt to fool me with some hasty line about a vacation trip would be an insult," she continued. Her voice had lost some of its quality of just a moment ago, replacing it with a hint of an edge that hummed like a vibroweapon.

"Fine then," said Suria. Her own tone was sharp-edged as well, and that sent up a small flare of dismay. "Are you on business for the Sith, then? Do you - did... Did _Revan_ send you on some mission here?"

Taisave turned her face toward Suria entirely, wearing her customary smirk. "I'm sure you _would_ like to know all about that, wouldn't you. But I've no need to let the Council know I'm even alive, let alone whether I may be _planning_ something."

She looked away, feeling somewhat inexplicably guilty. "That is how you've always been, hasn't it?" she murmured. Secretive. Loathe to make much of her true desires and objectives known to those with authority over her.

"And I'm quite pleased with where it's led me so far," Taisave countered, with a subtle shake of her head and an arch tone of voice that had once seemed merely an amusing quirk but now spoke unnervingly of arrogance. "Hmm. You look unhappy. Or... agitated. Have I disturbed you?"

She composed herself, taking a sip of tea. "Not at all." Yes. And all the more so with her so refined ability to read her presence in the Force and its subtle changes. Suria ahead never been quite clear if it was due to their familiarity, or a result of her species' Force-sight, or her own particular talents - most likely a combination of all three. She'd never contemplated it being a dangerous thing before.

"I'm only... Sad, I suppose. Disappointed. Even if you were loyal to the Revanchist cause - and I understand that, my sympathies were with you all nearly entirely through the war, you know that - to follow them into calling themselves Sith, into starting this war... You fought to save the galaxy from brutal invaders and now you turn around to subjugate the very systems you saved yourself?"

But Taisave looked entirely unphased, and that scared her possibly as much, possibly more, than had seeing her here to begin with. "Suria. We have our reasons for all these things you object to, but it's not anywhere near my decision, who can be told about the reasons we have... No matter what your sympathies _used_ to be, nobody would be stupid enough to spill all their secrets to a lapdog of the Council... not even a good friend."

The shift between cutting disgust and old tenderness in the space of a single utterance was near enough to give Suria whiplash and make her head spin. "I'm not a _lapdog_ ," she insisted, and she could hear anger, feel it warm in her stomach and that unsettled - she'd never _thought_ she'd been poor at controlling her emotions, but when had they trained for a situation like _this_? She was suddenly reminded of the stories of the Great Sith War, over a millennium ago, where padawans had turned against their masters in longing for a ghostly ancient Sith lord's promises of power.

"And doesn't that just look like a horribly short-sighted mistake," Taisave almost drawled, and Suria started. She'd pulled the thoughts right from her mind, to respond to them. It wasn't a skill she'd had before, or at least not one she'd ever displayed... She wondered what else her friend might have been hiding. Or what else she'd learned since she'd been gone.

"Oh, but wouldn't you _just_ like to know," she seemed to smirk, and Suria had to look away very quickly. "They would be willing to murder padawans on nothing more than a vague vision, and this isn't some conjecture, it's my own culture and we know the nature of such visions even if other Jedi of other species don't have the same sort of appreciation. They would murder padawans but not teach them about sacrifice, and the emotional toll of what they would require of you if you found your friend _fallen_ , with no nearby master to do the deed for you. That is how they would prevent the return of the Sith, and you still think they're wise and have your best interest at heart."

Suria felt her hands almost shaking, and she quickly set her tea down on he table with a deliberate precision. "If you want to talk about having your best interests at heart, you have no room to move in. _Malachor V_ , Taisave! Do I have to remind you that your glorious leader slaughtered about a half of your remaining forces trying to kill Mandalore? Do you think that sort of ruthlessness is justified? And there were people on Katarr who felt the shocks from that, if you didn't know. Those were _your people_ all your deeds were hurting."

Suria exhaled forcefully, and then shame seemed to rush in at the same time to take the place of the air leaving her.

"No," she whispered, to herself, and then half to Taisave, "No I shouldn't have..."

She could feel her fingers clenched to her palms in white-knuckled fists, and forced herself to relax them. It didn't make her feel any better, and her fingers still twitched anyway. She turned her face from Taisave, even knowing it wouldn't matter. It wasn't her facial features that allowed the other woman to know what she was feeling, but her Force presence.

"The anger? The passion?" she asked, even though she knew full well the answer, Her own hand came to rest on Suria's. "But see? There's that old glow back. They aren't going to stifle how you care about things. They can't, not without removing something essential about you."

Suria turned her head back - perhaps it was morbid curiosity at whatever note in her friend's tone had made her uneasy, and she wanted to see her face. (Though even to this day, she still was unsure how exactly she'd come to be able to read expressions with only half a face and no eyes to look at.)

Perhaps she could not read them half so well as she had thought. Whatever her expression was, it was strangely intense. Taisave had always been serious, certainly, but it was not quite the same as this.

She kissed her. Cupped a hand round the nape of Suria's neck, and pressed her lips against her own and - oh, but this was not at _all_ what she'd been expecting ( _had you never wondered?_ ). The folds of her hood brushed against Suria's nose and it tickled. She pulled away, feeling like hot and cold air currents falling past each other inside her. Briefly, she wondered if she might be shaking again.

Taisave had her head cocked to the side again, chin forward slightly like she might have been trying to puzzle something out. Or evaluating something. Waiting. For _her_.

Suria grabbed the sides of her hood and pulled her in to return the kiss. Taisave obliged, eagerly, the one hand returning to the nape of her neck and the other wrapping around her waist. Her lips felt like they were curved into a smirk, and her mouth tasted like shortbread and smoke.

 _What in the world do you think you're_ doing? came the thought that hoped to drag her back to her senses, after a mercifully short time. It took her a second to pull herself away. Assuredly red-faced.

"Hmm, let me guess, the Jedi that have infested your mind are telling you you're doing something wrong," said Taisave, fingers still stroking her arm. It was teasing her, mocking them, so sure of herself and laughing at everything else. Laughing with contempt just below the surface.

"This wasn't why I came here," Suria mumbled, unwilling to look at her. For several reasons. "You should come back with me."

That got a grin. A slightly malicious grin. "Maybe that was the plan, no?" she said, and Suria bit her lip at the realisation.

"I will not be a Sith. You're deluding yourself. Like all the rest of your new friends."

"Ah, but not like any of my _old_ friends, is that it?" She brushed fingertips along the line of her jaw, and Suria's mouth twitched as she tried to ignore the touch. "You shouldn't confine yourself like this," she breathed. "Not when passion makes you shine so beautifully."

"It can't be beautiful if it shouldn't be there." The words didn't feel like conviction. They just felt like more rote lessons. "Serenity. Peace."

Taisave seemed to laugh. "You would quote the Code, instead of providing your own arguments? Instead of trusting yourself? That Code is not the only source of wisdom in the galaxy, Suria. How many other Force traditions have died because they don't adhere sufficiently to this Light-Dark distinction fashioned by the Jedi?"

"You have your own traditions still, don't you? And you've been in contact with the Jedi for thousands of years, don't pretend you haven't. If some Force traditions have been wiped out it was because they were _dangerous_. You're twisting your history lessons."

Taisave scowled. She'd ever taken pride in her knowledge, most of all, Suria knew. Her arguments. And she'd almost always been able to convince most anybody of her point of view, given long enough, Suria no exception and to be honest the very opposite of that. It wasn't something that Suria was proud of, not now, though it also hadn't been something she used to consider much. Even when her masters had pointed it out as something to watch for. Perhaps now at least she had started, when it could count.

"That's your propaganda, isn't it. You'll see. But you want to quote Codes? You can quote mine in the currents of your Force presence, now."

Leaning in again, she pressed her lips this time to the line of Suria's neck, and a sweet pain blossomed beneath her mouth.

"You see?" she murmured, still pressed close in to the crook of her neck, warm breath tickling the fine hairs there. Suria clamped her mouth shut (when had it fallen open?) and resisted the urge to rub her fingers against the sore spot. The need to resist made the hurting even sweeter. "Peace is a lie..."

Her eyes widened and her breath hitched a fraction as Taisave continued the sharp kisses down the line of her throat. Her fingers climbed simultaneously up the back of her neck, and Suria felt her hair falling down around her shoulders, freed from the clasps she'd held it in. When she drew back, they were still for a long second that hovered in the air between them. Then an impulse took her, and she spun Taisave back (there was no use of Force power in it, none, she thought), gripping her shoulders, and she kissed her hard against the wall.

"I can take time to enjoy myself," she gasped, between each meeting of their parted lips, "without thinking it means it needs to consume me."

"Doesn't it?" Taisave's voice had become more air than sound, and her head was tilted back against the wall. The shallow rise and fall of her chest was almost entrancing. "It's passion, in the moment, it rules you, and once you taste it you won't ever be free of the longing. It is you, and you feed it, and it grows stronger, _you_ grow str- "

She bit off her words with a sharp intake of breath as Suria took her lower lip between her teeth, tugging just enough to sting, and then, pushing back the cloth of her hood, the lobe of her ear, the skin on the side of her neck. Taisave's hands around her waist became the points of fingernails into her back, and it only made her bite down harder.

Suria stopped when the sharp breaths became a pleased whimper. "I don't see any strength in this," she near hissed. The tone she took didn't satisfy her, edging too close to anger for her comfort. She didn't want to be lying to herself. She could feel, she could feel strongly, but that didn't make it something that would rule her, it didn't make it an attachment.

But Taisave only laughed, faintly. "It does look like strength on my part." A pause. "Not yours. But that's all from _your_ denial."

Suria almost ground her teeth in frustration. But she would not let Taisave know the way her words itched. Not so obviously, at the very least, if she could not help the way she felt in the Force, as she seemed so increasingly unable to do.

"I don't deny anything." _I acknowledge, and set aside. As should be done._

Hands slid from Suria's waist up her back. She wanted to melt into the touch, but stayed with her spine straightened, giving nothing.

"Will not deny _me_ anything," Taisave corrected her, with a winning smirk. _That_ did not quite make her want to melt. Something else, rather. But she held it in check, caged, in the touch of her fingers to the swell of Taisave's cheekbone, just below the hem of her hood.

Suria's level tone almost surprised her. "That's what you'd do? Make this a power game?" She could remember Taisave as a little girl, always so frustrated at the tactics the masters in charge of the Enclave would use to 'coerce' them into their duties. And later, always raging against others' authority or power, at any injustice that came from that power. How things had changed, it seemed.

It might have been her imagination, but it seemed as if Taisave's jaw twitched just slightly. "Hardly the end goal," she said though, and it certainly made the twitch sound imagined. As did the way she leaned in to mouth the spot where Suria's neck met her ear.

"Then what- ah, what is?"

"I told you," said Taisave, low and with some humour to it, just before Suria felt her teeth catch against her earlobe.

With such an infuriating statement, so many things she'd told her, (such a heated distraction,) she could not quite guess what exactly it what that was meant. But none of it she would have liked, she was at least sure.

"No," said Suria finally, letting up her grip against Taisave's shoulder, pulling her hand away from the other woman's face. "I'm not going to play those games with you, even if they aren't the end." The words sounded more confident than she felt, but you became whatever you pretended at if you pretended long enough. Right?

Taisave took one of Suria's hands in her own, as thought they might be dance partners. She supposed they were, in their own way. With certain poetic licenses taken. "Oh, but Suria, darling. We are all pulled up into power games, whether or not we play them. Here I am at least showing you that you could be a player instead of a piece."

She cocked her head then, but Suria did not deign to answer such clear baiting with a reply. Just watched her. Evenly. That had always been the way to get through to Taisave, hadn't it been? She never took kindly to games, or people she thought had not committed to their goal, or people who refused to treat her with a measure of seriousness. Suria was not about to make such a mistake.

But Taisave seemed in a mood to continue talking, continue filling empty spaces with emptier words.

"The goals of your mission were unimportant to the Council, you know," she said. More taunts. "They already know about the deaths. They know the deaths were because of those allied with our goals."

"You're not making sense."

Taisave's face did something that Suria had come to identify as equivalent to raising an eyebrow. "Aren't I? Do you just not want to see? I'm telling you now, Suria, my talk of players and pieces isn't hypothetical. You are a piece, now, here. Being moved around by the Council, to get to the Sith. You are _bait_."

It wasn't true. She knew that. It couldn't be. It was so obviously a lie, one Taisave had made up on the spot with no evidence for the claim, because there _was_ none.

She could see the faces of the Masters on Dantooine in her memory, when they revealed to her that they had never intended to support the Revanchists at all, and had merely sent her to pretend to attach herself to their cause so they could obtain knowledge of their plans, their tactics, their internal rhetoric. It had been couched in much nicer words, of course, but she knew what it was that she'd been manipulated into doing. Spying on her friends.

A lie. It was a lie. How many other lies had the Sith woven throughout the centuries, this new resurgence or the order as a whole? What would be one more? They cared nothing for bonds of friendship; why should a Sith care to spare a friend's - _once-friend's_ , the back of her mind insisted -  feelings if wounding them would draw her closer in?

A sudden stab of hurt prodded sharply in her chest and seemed to push up the feeling of tears welling against her eyes, though the tears themselves did not come. "Yes, I'm bait, and you're _heartless_ ," she bit out. "Coming here pretending to be friends. Offering me tea and cookies. And then you'd say something like that, because clearly you don't care at all about our friendship any more, do you? You just want to use it."

Taisave's face was still, but still holding Suria's hand, she stroked the back of it, as though intending to be comforting. False. Fake. All false. All of it -

"I would use our friendship to show you the truth," murmured Taisave, bringing Suria's hand to her lips. It tickled her fingers. It touched her, a tiny ribbon of false warmth. She should have pulled away. She didn't. "Truth. Not lies. Unlike some people."

Suria twisted her hand away, finally. Her heart and chest and throat felt like they were weighed down with lumps of hard, dead weight, but the rest of her was energised, alert, clear and powerful.

Anger?

"Fine then." The words spilled out too quickly, almost forceful and urgent as though they'd fall to pieces if they were not given sound; she thought she didn't mean them but that wasn't how they felt. They felt like truth. "Just because you're all going to lie to me, one time or another. Don't even pretend you aren't lying. So they lie. You lie too. Why should I listen to you, why should I pick you over them?"

The air seemed to shake around her, but she realised belatedly that she, rather than the air, was the one shaking.

Taisave slipped her fingers through the strands of Suria's loose hair, gently. If asked, Suria would have denied leaning into it.

"Because the one here who lies is somebody you love. The ones there who lie are people who would use you to betray the ones you love."

The words were too calm to cut her as they did.

Suria grabbed at Taisave's wrist, pulling her hand away from her hair and slamming it back against the wall. Taisave looked almost shocked for a moment. She might have been happy to see the expression (hells, what was wrong with her?), had it been strong enough to interrupt whatever she was feeling now.

"I do not love you."

There was the barest hint of a tremble in her voice.

And when her fingers curled around the back of Taisave's neck, and her lips pressed against Taisave's own, there was a tremble in them all too.

Taisave gasped beneath her. Again, when her nails dug scratch marks into Taisave's neck; when she tried to pull her wrist away from the wall and Suria would not let her. When, finally, her words, her lies, were quieted by Suria's own deeds.

This was strength, right? She refused to be taken in by lies. Would make Taisave believe her truths - and that was strength. Her own strength, her own power, over herself, over others. Right? Right?

But though Taisave still did not make noise to speak now, Suria could hear her words again, echoing out of the memory. _It does look like strength on my part. Not yours._

_Peace is a lie. There is only passion._


End file.
